“Is it time for space socialism?”
— Laura Kate Dale
Markov is the fifth season of D&D 5e based audio drama, Dice Funk. It's set in a solar system called Markov * , focusing on a crew of professional adventurers.
Starring:
- Lauren Morgan as Sasha Grier, Aarakocra bard
- Quinn Larios as Dr. Olivia Adler, merfolk doctor
- Laura Kate Dale as Captain Liamoira Melbeck, Giff ranger
- Conrad Zimmerman as Dregg, ogre paladin
- Austin Yorski as the DM
Season 5 Tropes
- Adventure Guild: An sci-fi example. Since it would be nearly impossible to patrol all of known space with regular law enforcement, crews of 'adventurers' are contracted to work in a specific region of space, exploring and taking care of any problems they come across. Like a much more mercenary version of Starfleet.
- Beast Man: Liamoira (as a Giff hippo woman) and Sasha (as a barn owl Aarakocra) are pretty big tone setters.
- Combining Mecha: In the last battle, the Tuff Bastards combine their mecha into a giant war machine called The Greatest Dane.
- Cool Starship: This being a space opera setting based on Spelljammer, it's a given.
- The Bastard's ship, the Snallygaster. Named on the condition that the ship vaguely resemble one.
- The first other ship they come across is a Neogi Deathspider straight out of Spelljammer. It looks like a giant mosquito.
- After sacrificing the Snallygaster to get to the sun, the Bastards get a ship from the future called (and resembling) the Tsuchinoko.
- Crapsack World: The planet Fermat is an awful hellscape. On the bright side, this makes it the perfect place to stage a massive-scale sting operation or contain an omnivorous extradimensional slug-thing.
- Cult: The Purists are an alien cult on the planet Gloria.
- Everyone Is a Super: Due to the events of the Valentine season, everyone in the universe now has a conduit power. Depending on your luck, they could be anything from amazing and powerful all the way down to pointlessly stupid.
- As Austin points out, the only reason everyone the Bastards fight seem to have useful powers is that being the sort of person who would go on space adventures and get in fights is what would get you those kinds of powers. Someone whose deepest desire was to be a mid-level bureaucrat probably wouldn't get heat vision.
- Family of Choice: A big theme regarding the Snallygaster's crew is that they are all closer to one another than they are with others, to the point of all agreeing to become fugitives to protect each other.
- Fantastic Racism: Invicta and their xenophobic views on non-earth races is all about this trope, using their hatred of Illithids to justify their hatred of pretty much everyone else in the galaxy.
- Its leaders imply that this is played up (except for the Illithid, who they do hate) to drum up support from fanatical racists, upping Invicta's numbers and getting them loyal shock troops to throw at their enemies. Whether this behavior is better or worse than actually being massive xenophobes is another matter.
- Giant Spider: The Neogi, albeit not as 'giant' as most giant spiders. They only come up to about the knee (or the ankle, in Dregg's case).
- God Is Dead: One of the first setting elements mentioned this season.
- Great Offscreen War: The Illithid War. Many of its veterans are now in Invicta.
- Hell Is War: Acheron is an endless war fought between armies of the dead, led by their killers. Cassius plans to kill as many people as he can so he'll have the biggest army in the afterlife.
- His Name Really Is "Barkeep": Members of the Solitaire race name themselves after their individual conduit power.
- Lady Drunk: Liamoira is explicitly and gloriously this.
- Mini-Mecha: This season introduces Mechs which people use to great effect in combat and allows them to fight in space without their ships.
- Our Cryptids Are More Mysterious: The Loch Ness monster, The Flatwoods Monster, and The Mothman are all important characters.
- Planet of Hats: This being Dice Funk, played with and deconstructed. Many races have a hat, but the Bastards will frequently run across exceptions to those rules, and if the hattery is explored there will usually be a deeper reason for the tendency.
- The Reigar's hat is artistry, and it's even said that they blew up their own planet in an artistic display. They're actually using this hat to cover the fact that it was really destroyed by the Maxwells and Kajita the Sun Dragon.
- Giff in particular are explored quite a bit, since the crew has a traditional Giff and is led by an exception to the hat. It's posited that, as the Giff no longer know where their homeworld is, their mercenary nature is really about the contracts involved; they like to know they have somewhere they can go, and where they know under which specific conditions they'll be welcome.
- Replaced the Theme Tune: By episode 22 the intro becomes Layton's Theme [Electro Swing Remix]
by The Musical Ghost while the outro becomes Big Shell West Bristol from OverClocked ReMix. - Space Opera: The main setting for the season.
- Theme Tune: Initially Your Reality [Future Bass Remix] by The Musical Ghost.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The climax of the season is the end result of the unforeseeable consequences of several characters' actions. A group of Reigar left their secret society and brought some special weapons with them. The Caravellas bought the weapons and the Bastards got ahold of them when Dregg took over the Caravellas. Ragnar gave the Bastards these weapons when they infiltrated the Cult of the Purists and when Olivia got herself captured by Cassius he got ahold of one. Cassius noticed the similarities between the weapons and the Maxwells and realized that the Reigar knew how to bring them back, leading him to become a galactic level threat.
- Utopia: Sol managed to fend off the Illithid slavers because of this, though this was in the distant past.
- Earth, with some caveats. On the one hand, it's now a post-scarcity socialist government where its people have all their basic needs met by default. On the other hand, Fantastic Racism is still rampant (especially towards non-Sol races) and no one seems to care to address it, and the Sol government itself is an expansionist force and much less pleasant to deal with for non-citizens.
- Utopia Justifies the Means: Sol and the Illithid both justify their rampant expansionism and colonization as looking out for their people. The Markov independence faction does a bit of this too, but they aren't expanding so much as taking their own system back from Sol.
